A concern of supply chain assurance is that a component has not been cloned and/or tampered with, and accordingly a customer has a high level of trust that received components are authentic. For example, a company that assembles digital devices wants to be confident that a supplier is providing trustworthy integrated circuits (ICs), and the ICs have not been created, or tampered with, by a malicious entity that intends to incorporate cloned ICs into the assembled digital devices. In another example, a customer wants to know that a supplier is providing ICs manufactured in accordance with the customer's requirements, including fabrication of wafers and dies which are utilized to form the ICs.
Often, the customer can only rely on a supplier's assurance that a die was manufactured at a particular plant, at a particular time, e.g., as identified by a label provided with the die. However, the manufacturer can manipulate process information to give the impression that the die satisfies processing requirements, but in actuality, the die has been substituted with a die manufactured on different equipment, the die was manufactured at a different time and/or date to that disclosed by the manufacturer, the die is not sourced from wafer manufactured to customer requirements, etc. Further, conventional approaches of determining that an IC is authentic can require destructive testing of a portion of ICs received from a supplier, making such supply chain assurance costly in both time and inventory.